Over the weekend, Alan Moore engaged in a 2.5-hour webchatas a fundraiser for Cleveland's Harvey Pekar Library Statue. During this frank conversation, the Bearded Master addressed questions about his feud with Grant Morrison (short answer: there isn't one), why he wrote Neonomicon ("Because I had a massive, massive tax debt."), and the difference between DC resurrecting Watchmen and Moore appropriating literary characters for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen:

In literature, I would say that it's different. I would say, and it might be splitting hairs, but I'm not adapting these characters. I'm not doing an adaptation of Dracula or King Solomon's Mines. What I am doing is stealing them. There is a difference between doing an adaptation, which is evil, and actually stealing the characters, which, as long as everybody's dead or you don't mention the names, is perfectly alright by me. I'm not trying to be glib here, I genuinely do feel that in literature you've got a tradition that goes back to Jason and the Argonauts of combining literary characters [...]

It's just irresistible to do these fictional mash-ups. They've been going on for hundreds of years and I feel I'm a part of a proud literary tradition in doing that. With taking comic characters that have been created by cheated old men, I feel that that is different [...] and that's my take on the subject

And most importantly, Moore announced that he's working on a new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen project with Kevin O'Neill, the 48-page one-shot comic Nemo: Heart of Ice.

In this comic — which takes place in Antarctica in the 1920s — Jules Verne will collide with H.P. Lovecraft. "It takes place in Antarctica and [the work of H.P. Lovecraft] is a major component. You figure it out," promised Moore. If all goes according to plan, Heart of Ice will be out by the end of 2012. The next League book, Century: 2009, is slated for June.